Were Facebook and WhatsApp hacked last week?
According to the data privacy website PrivacyAffairs, a user of a known hacker forum posted an announcement claiming to possess the personal data of more than 1.5 billion Facebook users.
The information was up for sale.
One prospective buyer claimed to have been quoted £3,700 for the data of a million Facebook user accounts.
The data allegedly included users’ name, email, location, gender, phone number and user ID.
The allegations emerged coincidently with the outage of Facebook and the platforms it owns – Instagram and WhatsApp – although there is nothing to suggest the two are linked.
All three platforms, which are owned by Facebook, were forced to confirm on rival service Twitter that they were working to fix the global outage.
